How to Write an Incident Report in 6 Simple Steps
If you are injured at work in Richmond, reporting the injury and filing an incident report is the first crucial step to secure your rights as an injured worker. Hence, in this article, we guide you through incident report writing. Let us begin with shedding light on what this report is and its benefits to help you get a clear understanding.
What Is an Incident Report
The incident report is a document that records the incident, determines its causes and actions taken, and makes the stakeholders aware of the incident. This report helps investigate and analyze the event and helps assess the workplace for uncontrolled hazards and potential risks. Moreover, the incident report offers the following benefits.
- It heightens the incident’s gravity and seriousness
- The incident report raises awareness of hazards, risks, and threats impacting workers
- It helps organizations resolve, change, improve, or eliminate policies to ensure workplace safety
Moreover, the incident report can be of 4 types as stated below.
Types of incident reports
Below are the four types of reports.
- Sentinel events or unexpected occurrences that cause severe psychological or physical injury or death
- The near misses, i.e., situations involving no injuries but the potential harm due to the detected risks.
- Adverse events connected to vaccines, medicine, and medical devices. Such events occur when any act of omission/commission harms a patient instead of treating their disease or condition.
- No harm events, i.e., the incidents that must be communicated to make people aware of any harm that may occur due to risks or dangers in an organization.
Not that you are familiar with the incident report, let us walk you through the steps to write it.
Steps to Write an Incident Report
You can follow the below step-by-step process to create an effective incident report.
- Collect the basic information
The first step is to collect the fundamental information about the incident, such as the type of injury, whether or not the injury is fatal, if there was any property damage, when and where the incident occurred, what task was being performed at the time of the incident, and how was the workplace environment at that time.
- Note injuries or damages
In this step, you are required to describe in detail and, if possible, provide a picture in evidence of the injury or damage the incident has caused.
- Identify the individuals affected by the incident
This step requires you to provide the details (name, gender, job title, etc.) of the individuals involved in the incident or affected by it.
- Discern witnesses and note their statements
Witness statements strengthen your claim and help understand the event sequence. Hence, in this step, you should identify the people present at the site of the incident and record their statements. Please ensure to get these statements signed by the witnesses to make sure they are accurate.
- Take the required action
This step in the incident report writing refers to the corrective actions to eliminate the incident’s recurrence. It also includes the actions you can take to complete the report.
- Closing the report
Lastly, you are required to close the report by collecting the management’s comments related to the incident. To ensure accountability, this report should be signed by you (the reporter) and a person from the upper management of your organization to validate the information in the report as unquestionable and truthful.
We hope you no longer have any doubts related to incident reports. However, if any confusion persists, it is in your best interest to consult an experienced lawyer.
